Grades—as students, they occupy our minds often, if not 24/7. Indeed, they seem to control us more than we can control them.

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Aspiring for a Perfect GPA

Growing up—from elementary to middle school—I was always at the top of my class, always doing the most. The adults in my family prided themselves on my smartness. My story is, maybe surprisingly, not all that uncommon.

And, honestly? It wasn’t so difficult before high school, my coursework was light enough, and, more importantly, I was self-driven because I enjoyed learning, and fortunate to have the privilege to do so.

Then, I moved to a college-prep high school. Suddenly, everyone around me was a previously top-of-their-class, perfect student. Suddenly, I was no longer a big fish in a small pond, but one of many. Still, I felt as if I had to be the best of the best, maintaining a perfect 4.0 GPA while taking the hardest possible classes. “Academically capable” was a label I had long internalized—my freshman year self could not separate my idea of self from being a perfect student.

Freshman year, I did just fine, maintaining my A average and a pretty healthy social life. Yes, I didn’t fall apart immediately—I think we rarely do. It is important to acknowledge, however, that we took our first semester of freshman year pass/fail in my school, which curbed my desire for perfect grades, albeit temporarily.

A broken system never lasts. Sophomore year, my course load became heavier and more rigorous. My test and assignment grades started slipping, and I had even earned my first-ever C.

Even when I was able to get a perfect score, it was now because I had spent hours in the library cramming. Because perfect used to come easily to me, I never built healthy, productive study habits. Yet, when I looked at my classmates amidst all my stress, they seemed to remain perfect while making it look like light work. This was when I really started drowning. Even when I fought tooth and nail, it was never enough.

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College, College, College: the “Downward Spiral”

I hear this often from my friends (now, more than ever, as a rising senior in the thick of the college application season) and have thought the same myself: What if I don’t get an A on that test, and my grade in the class is ruined, and my GPA goes down, and I don’t get into college, and I don’t get a job …

You can see where this is going. I’m not going to say we shouldn’t think like this, because I absolutely understand where all of these worries are coming from, and, to be honest, I don’t believe that they are completely ungrounded, either.

I can’t say for sure that the people around me represent the general population, but it seems like all my friends and classmates are on a race to college. Heck, it seems like even my conversations with other high schoolers I’ve just met quickly drift towards the topic of college.

To be more specific, our conversations often revolve around college applications, and the race seems to be towards crafting the ‘perfect’ college application, and then getting into a ‘perfect’ Ivy League school. Rarely do I hear talk about college life—about what we want to do once we get to college. It is even rarer that I hear talk about what we imagine our lives to be like after college. Sure, sometimes we’ll think about careers and whatnot, but rarely about how we want to live, or even what we want to do in our careers beyond surface-level aspirations.

It seems that we are seeing college as the finish line, but in reality, it is nothing more than a checkpoint. Our lives keep moving after we get into college.

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So, What About Social Life?

Obsessed with being a perfect student, I preoccupied myself with endless studying. Yet, there’s only so much time in the day. As such, my relationships started falling apart, especially as most of my friends shared my obsession to various degrees.

We didn’t have time to hang out and truly get to know each other: our likes and dislikes, hobbies, interests, etc. In fact, we rarely took time to do those hobbies ourselves. When we did spend time together, it was often joint study sessions. When we talked, it was often about academics, or as previously mentioned, the looming topic of college.

Because so many of my friends were in a similar position as I was, we formed an echo chamber that kept on reinforcing our fixation on academic excellence, until it was the only thing we (or at least I) could think about.

At some point, we became so hyper-focused on academics that, when problems arose, we didn’t spend the energy to resolve them and just glossed them over. As this happened over and over, though, friendships crumbled.

Conclusion

Junior year was my wake-up call. Maybe it was my first A- in a class sophomore spring that finally liberated me of my (now impossible) pursuit of a perfect 4.0. Or maybe it was me getting lucky and finding a group of friends who shared my interests and were okay with just being teenagers together.

Likely, it was a combination of both. Counseling helped, too.

I’m not going to pretend to know how to stop drowning in the waters of academic excellence, but I do know that once I stopped, I was so much happier. And, surprisingly, academics came more easily to me, because I picked the classes that interested me the most— I enjoyed spending time with the topics and, as a result, did better in those classes! I was willing, too, to hang out with my friends and enjoy living high school life, even if that meant compromising a few hours of studying.

It is now, when I stopped solely obsessing over grades, that I feel more secure and happy than ever. After all, what’s the point of leading a successful life if you don’t enjoy living it?

To be honest, it's much easier to write this article than to act as a happier, healthier, and more secure version of myself. Academic excellence isn’t my sole pursuit anymore, but I still think about it often, sometimes obsessively. I know what to do, or more accurately, who to become. But, to be honest, I’m still murky about how to get there.

At the same time, I hope this article can offer a spark of hope, too, conferring the possibility for all of us to change into versions of ourselves that are happier, healthier, and just as successful.